I Will Repay eBook

But on the walls of the Louvre, of the great palace
of whilom kings, where the Roi Soleil held his Court,
and flirted with the prettiest women in France, there
the new and great Republic has affixed its final mandate.

A great poster glued to the wall bears the words:
“La Loi concernan les Suspects.”
Below the poster is a huge wooden box with a slit at
the top.

This is the latest invention for securing the safety
of this one and indivisible Republic.

Henceforth everyone becomes a traitor at one word
of denunciation from an idler or an enemy, and, as
in the most tyrannical days of the Spanish Inquisition
one-half of the nation was set to spy upon the other,
that wooden box, with its slit, is put there ready
to receive denunciations from one hand against another.

Had Juliette paused but for the fraction of a second,
had she stopped to read the placard setting forth
this odious law, had she only reflected, then she
would even now have turned back, and fled from that
gruesome box of infamies, as she would from a dangerous
and noisome reptile or from the pestilence.

But her long vigil, her prayers, her ecstatic visions
of heroic martyrs had now completely numbed her faculties.
Her vitality, her sensibilities were gone: she
had become an automaton gliding to her doom, without
a thought or a tremor.

She drew the letter from her bosom, and with a steady
hand dropped it into the box. The irreclaimable
had now occurred. Nothing she could henceforth
say or do, no prayers or agonised vigils, no miracles
even, could undo her action or save Paul Deroulede
from trial and guillotine.

One or two groups of people hurrying to their work
had seen her drop the letter into the box. A
couple of small children paused, finger in mouth,
gazing at her with inane curiosity; one woman uttered
a coarse jest, all of them shrugged their shoulders,
and passed on, on their way. Those who habitually
crossed this spot were used to such sights.

That wooden box, with its mouthlike slit was like
an insatiable monster that was constantly fed, yet
was still gaping for more.

Having done the deed Juliette turned, and as rapidly
as she had come, so she went back to her temporary
home.

A home no more now; she must leave it at once, to-day
if possible. This much she knew, that she no
longer could touch the bread of the man she had betrayed.
She would not appear at breakfast, she could plead
a headache, and in the afternoon Petronelle should
pack her things.

She turned into a little shop close by, and asked
for a glass of milk and a bit of bread. The woman
who served her eyed her with some curiosity, for Juliette
just now looked almost out of her mind.

She had not yet begun to think, and she had ceased
to suffer.

Both would come presently, and with them the memory
of this last irretrievable hour and a just estimate
of what she had done.